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VANCOUVER — The guess, by those who know such things, is that the torch that was passed from Brian Orser to Kurt Browning to Elvis Stojko to Jeff Buttle to Patrick Chan — world champions, all, with scarcely an ordinary moment in between — most likely will end up in the hands of Nam Nguyen.

Who is coached by Brian Orser. And the circle of life goes on.

The torch, evidently, will bypass Kevin Reynolds, who was fifth in the world a year ago, and Elladj Balde and Andrei Rogozine, all of whom were on Skate Canada’s ladder before Nam, and it will come to rest in the grasp of this remarkably self-possessed 15-year-old from Ottawa.

Heaven help him, this once-little squirt who first burst into the public consciousness when he skated in the gala of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, age 11, with a pair of big red glasses, and inspired a unanimous round of: “Isn’t he the cutest thing?”

Where he’s headed — nearly a foot taller and four years older, to his first senior world championships in Saitama, Japan next week, fresh off a world junior title — cute won’t cut it any more.

And all he’s got to do, not immediately but in due course, is keep a line of succession going that started with Orser’s world title in 1987 and spawned 11 more by Canadian male skaters over the next quarter-century.

All he’s got to do, unless Chan decides he wants to keep going after two Olympic quadrennials, is show strong signs in his first big-time acid test of being The Next One, capable of taking over as the primary carrier of Canadian hopes for the next couple of Olympic cycles.

But no pressure, kid.

“Yeah, well people call me the next Patrick Chan, so I guess that’s fine, it’s all right,” the Vancouver-raised son of Vietnamese immigrants said Wednesday, on the phone following his third session of the day at the Toronto Cricket Club.

Two years after moving with his parents to Toronto to be trained by Orser, who may be the most sought-after finishing coach of skating talent in the world — or if he isn’t, he ought to be — Nam is stronger, faster, and has bigger and more secure jumps than in his West Coast days, when he simply out-performed other skaters by delivering, unfailingly, on the day of the competition.

But he’s only 15, even so, and it’s a long road from finally mastering the triple Axel to getting to the next level, where the quad — as Elvis’s (and Orser’s) old coach Doug Leigh used to say — “is like the American Express card. Don’t leave home without it.”

Nam, though, seems as unfazed by this challenge as he has been at every other step along the way. And with Orser, who has taken Korea’s Yuna Kim and Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu to gold medals in successive Winter Olympics, on his side, he has every reason to be confident.

“I think when I was still in Vancouver (actually Burnaby 8-Rinks), my overall skating wasn’t really powerful. I was going slow, and my posture wasn’t big, and everything was really small, even my jumps,” Nam said.

He might have mentioned that even he was small, then. He went from 4-foot-7 to 5-foot-5 in just over a year, and fought the growth spurt until just a few months ago.

Orser, he said, immediately emphasized more speed going into the jumps “and then we started focusing on my posture — it has to be straight, not hunched over — and the size of the jumps needed to be bigger,” Nam said.

“Compared to like two years ago when I first came here I’ve improved so much, and the result has shown in junior worlds.”

That it has. With a mixed bag of results on his resume heading into the last week’s competition in Sofia, Bulgaria, Nam produced the best skating of his life at the moment of truth, landed two triple Axels and won the world title with 217 points.

“That’d definitely be top 20 (at senior worlds), and last year Rogozine was our third man and he had 213 and he was 13th,” said Skate Canada’s high performance director Mike Slipchuk.

“But I think we’re kind of on the premise that this is an opportunity for Nam to find out where he fits in on the world scene. It’s just a nice little cachet to have, going in as world junior champion just a week ago. He’s not an unknown and people are going to be a little more aware of what he can do and he might get a second look, which is good.”

Orser isn’t worried about 15 being too tender an age to start piling on the expectations. Hanyu, after all, was 15 when he won junior worlds. Four years later, he was Olympic champion.

“I think it’s the appropriate age,” Orser said Wednesday. “I mean, Nam had a good Canadian championships, but when he came back from Four Continents in Taiwan, he was a different person. He skated bigger, skated faster — all the things we were trying to get from him, it just seemed like he was ready to take it on.

“There really is something special about Nam that I am seeing now. It was exciting to go to Sofia and showcase this new skater that was sort of on the radar, but there were a few other guys there that were expected to win, and they skated well, really well, but Nam outskated them, and he did it at every single practice. It’s almost like he just became ready for it.”

Whatever Nam becomes, Orser said, he will do it with a distinctive style.

“It’s kind of neat that he looks up to Patrick. But he also gets to skate alongside Yuzuru and Javier Fernandez, and things about them rub off as well,” he said.

“And the cool thing about Nam is that he’s a real character, and we’ve seen that for the last six years. The cute factor is over, though. We want to keep personality, but we want it to come out through really strong skating.”

The natural-born ham side, however, can be an asset. “He has a comfort level in front of people, the more the better,” Orser said.

“But it will be interesting to see how it goes in Japan, because that venue in Saitama is huge, it’s like 19,000 or 20,000 people. And it’s sold out. But you know, Nam’s starting to get a little bit of a following in Japan, because I brought him over for a couple of shows last summer, and people know him because he’s the guy who trains with Yuzuru, and has the same coach as Yuzuru.

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